I think 'in a mode of dance' sets the whole rest up, in a most interesting manner, Lawrence.
Thinking 'active verbs,' I might have just written 'danced,' or something like that, but all the kind of perception that follows follows from that recognition in the 'he'. So it's both a poem of percepts & of the perceiver's mind in action....
Doug
On 2012-05-12, at 11:34 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
> A bird, landing on the rubble
> in a mode of dance, on its own
> between high and low tide, hard by
> remnants, collapsing now, tumbled,
> of a quay from before ocean
> led the land edge stepping backward,
>
> appears to be all white, too far
> for him to identify. He thinks,
> briefly, of butterflies, the way
> it fluttered after its feet had touched
> on to a stone, a stark light hue
> compared with darkness beneath that.
>
> It is avian; and that's not all:
> he hadn't known he knew these things
> nor seen a structure in that heap
> until his lithe concentration
> of memory and eyes and thought
> gave intimate pattern to shapes.
>
>
>
> -----
> Lawrence Upton
> Visiting Fellow, Music Dept,
> Goldsmiths, University of London
> New Cross, London SE14 6NW
> ----
>
Douglas Barbour
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The postliterate sensibility is offended by anything that isn’t television, views with suspicion the compound sentence, the subordinate clause, words of more than three syllables. The home and studio audiences become accustomed to hearing voices swept clean of improvised literary devices, downsized into data points, degraded into industrial-waste product.
Lewis Lapham
